Conventions Of Fiction Research Articles

Afterlife and narrative in contemporary fiction

Afterlife and Narrative explores why life after death is such a potent cultural concept today, and why it is such an attractive prospect for modern fiction. The book mines a rich vein of imagined afterlives, from the temporal experiments of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. At the heart of the book is a focus on how the properties of the afterlife have become a tool for examining the capacities and conventions of narrative fiction. Modern novels carry the history of realism and its attempts to present life as it is, but many of the techniques which achieve these effects require perspectives and positions for narration that are profoundly un-lifelike. Each chapter of the book takes a fresh look at problems in narrative theory, taking all its cues from experimental narratives set in the afterlife, from avant-garde experimentation to popular genre fiction. Afterlife and Narrative examines, applies and refines anti-mimetic theories of fiction in readings of a group of texts which are after, but not in imitation of, life.

“Lizzie Do You Mind”: Gertrude Stein's Laws of Genre in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

Against previous critics’ readings of Stein's Blood on the Dining-Room Floor as a failed attempt at the hard-boiled genre, this article argues for the many ways in which the novel re-writes the gothic/domestic detective story in a brilliant tour de force that frames all that is un-natural about heteronormative Victorian family life while offering a lesbian alternative. In Stein's subversive and serious play with the forms and conventions of popular fiction, her positive invocations of Lizzie Borden as textual witness, her wide-reaching references to lesbian relationships in other of her works, and, finally, her virtuosic use of silence, Stein writes a profound critique of the patriarchal family through a radical unmaking of a thoroughly domestic literary form.

Ill Fated: The Disease of Racism in Julia Collins's <em>The Curse of Caste</em>

Ill Fated:The Disease of Racism in Julia Collins's The Curse of Caste Sarah Schuetze In Julia C. Collins's novel The Curse of Caste, Colonel Frank Tracy, a white Louisiana slaveowner, threatens to disinherit his son Richard and erase him from the family memory if he does not give up his attachment to Lina, a mixed-race woman and former slave whom he has married.1 Richard tells his father, "I cannot forsake my wife," for he plans to spend his life with her despite his father's disgust. Enraged, the colonel draws a pistol, points it at his son, and says, "I will see you die at my feet before you shall return to the arms of that accursed wife!" (41). He fires. The shot does not kill Richard, but the infection it causes puts him in a "critical state," keeping him bed-bound miles away from Lina for several months (43). He lies sick with a fever, often delirious and raving for his wife. His condition continues to worsen, and he seems to "fluctuat[e] between life and death" (45). During one of his unconscious fits of fever, Richard proclaims, "What matters it, if her skin is dark, if the blood of the despised race tinges her veins? Oh! believe me, she is good and pure!" (44). His words echo those used in anti-miscegenation arguments to relate blackness to toxicity and contamination. Collins presents an interesting juxtaposition here through Richard, a man whose body and blood battle toxic infection even as he professes the purity of his black wife's body and blood. The novel draws upon the cultural association between race and disease yet undermines it to show the true toxin to be racism, not race. If we could freeze the moment when Colonel Tracy fires that shot and map its impact on other characters' lives and bodies, we would see a web connecting several characters in this novel who suffer from critical and prolonged illnesses. It is as if the bullet and the hatred it represents travel like a virus, linking these characters: Richard; his mother, Mrs. Nellie Tracy; his wife, Lina; [End Page 82] his friend George Manville; his father, Colonel Tracy; and even his daughter, Claire, who is born just before Lina dies. In this essay I argue that by pathologizing the violence of racism, Collins creates a contagion that connects the novel's sick characters and establishes an alternative family tree linking the births of black and white members. Because they are sources of information essential to repairing the rifts in the family (and the narrative), these ill figures are vital to the narrative, whereas the convention in nineteenth-century fiction is for invalids to be in-valid or ancillary to the plot. By reading sickness in The Curse of Caste as disability, I do not suggest that disability should be read as a disease or as a condition requiring correction, as the medical model of disability studies implies. Instead, I think our analysis of illness in literature could benefit from a social model of disability studies that focuses on what Simi Linton has called society's ableist bias (161). Scholars agree that literary representations of sickness and disability reflect and contribute to the social understanding of different embodiments. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson has argued, the sick and disabled inhabit extraordinary or non-normate bodies that typically receive outsider status in culture and literature.2 Similarly, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder recognize that authors' dependence upon characters marked by physical difference has the potential to cause "disabled populations [to] suffer the consequences of representational association with deviance" (8). Rather than craft the experience of sickness in her novel as aberrant, Collins integrates and validates her invalids by connecting them to one another and making their knowledge central to the plot. Whereas sick or disabled individuals are culturally imagined to lack authority because of their bodies, in The Curse of Caste they possess authority because the health of their bodies is compromised. The physical limitations on their speaking and writing mean that the knowledge they hold—knowledge that others seek—is contained within their disabled bodies. The attention Collins...

The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America

JAY WATSON University of Mississippi JAIME HARKER University of Mississippi The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America ON FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2005, OPRAH WINFREY MADE A STARTLING announcement: Oprah’s Book Club (OBC), her enormous reading group, had chosen for its summer selection three of William Faulkner’s most critically acclaimed novels. As I Lay Dying was scheduled for June, The Sound and the Fury for July, and Light in August, appropriately, for August. The program amounted to a whole “Summer of Faulkner,” as she billed it. Reactions were swift and for the most part skeptical. The mayor of Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, bookseller Richard Howorth, expressed doubts to The New York Times that Oprah’s readers would last the summer: “With a good reading-group leader, they’ll make it through ‘As I Lay Dying.’. . . But they’re going to start ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and say, ‘What is this?’” Howorth “then feigned throwing a book over his shoulder” (Wyatt). A writer for The Nation saluted Oprah’s seriousness of purpose but still expressed reservations: Faulkner? Oprah? Really? The announcement amounted to nothing less than a sneak attack on the whole idea of beach reading—and on the intelligentsia’s perception of [Winfrey] as the Queen of Midcult. . . . By proposing to read not one but three works by a dead white male whose prose laid siege to the conventions of narrative fiction, and whose furiously lyrical exploration of race and the American South still manages to unsettle readers, Oprah is taking a major gamble on her audience’s attention span and political sensitivities. (Tyree) From the start, then, it was clear that the promise and threat of the Summer of Faulkner lay in the encounter it was staging between an interpretive community consisting of hundreds of thousands of nonacademic readers and a writer alternately celebrated and vilified for his high modernist impenetrability. 356 Watson and Harker I How did Faulkner get here? What brought him to this juncture, at which a twenty-first-century media giant and popular tastemaker could seemingly set out to recover a trio of his modernist masterpieces for a popular reading audience? Was Faulkner’s work even in need of recovery for a general readership? Had he ever really gone away? Or could we understand the Summer of Faulkner instead as a reclamation of Faulkner’s work not so much for as on behalf of a mass audience to whom that work had been more or less continuously presented for seventy-five years, from the moment in September of 1930 when Faulkner, already the author of four published but little-read novels, placed his first short story with The Saturday Evening Post.?1 Evidence for this popular Faulkner, an artist engaged with and available to popular audiences up to and including Oprah’s huge online reading community, abounds if you just look in the right places. And a good place to begin is Faulkner’s career-long, eagerly pursued relationship with the Post, one of the largest-circulating US magazines of his era, where he published twenty stories and novel excerpts during his lifetime. Faulkner scholars like to cite the poor sales figures for his novels during the 1930s and early 1940s, his most fertile creative period, in order to present the writer as a misunderstood, underappreciated modernist genius, ahead of his time in the provincial US South and out of place in middlebrow America. But when Faulkner published in the Post during these same years, his work became available to millions of readers—indeed, tens of millions, if we take account of how “slicks” like thePostactuallycirculatedincontemporaryhouseholds,neighborhoods, offices, and waiting rooms, passed along from reader to reader. Many of Faulkner’s Post stories were crowd-pleasers—“Ambuscade,” “Two Soldiers,” and “Shingles for the Lord” are just a few that come to mind—demonstrating Faulkner’s facility with popular genres and his clear interest in finding, and resonating with, a large audience. He may not have wanted to be a literary celebrity or a public figure, but he indisputably wished to be read, and read widely.2 1 The story was “Thrift,” The Saturday...

The lesbian fantastic: a critical study of science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, and gothic writings

Science fiction has long been a haven for lesbian writers, allowing them to use the genre to discuss their marginalized status. This critical work examines how lesbian authors have used the structures and conventions of science fiction to embody characters, relationships and other themes that relate to their experience as the quintessential Other in the broader culture. Topics include lesbian gothic, fantasy, science fiction, mixed genre texts and historical background for the works discussed. A vital addition to the scholarship on homosexuality and culture.

The Critique of Trauma and the Afterlife of the Novel in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

In the last few years, Tom Mcarthy has launched a sustained campaign against the pieties of the traditional British novel. His debut novel Remainder sets out to debunk the conventions of trauma fiction, that, despite its emphasis on fragmentation, repetition, and temporal dislocation, often continues to rely on the conventions of psychological realism. In Remainder , trauma emerges not as a psychological event, but rather as an intractable, dysphoric, subjectless affect. Showing how trauma operates across the domains of the social, the somatic, and the psychological, the novel inaugurates a different account of the linkage of literature and trauma.

Pathways' End: The Space of Trauma in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking

Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking is a trilogy of ideas obsessed with the experience and healing of trauma. Using the conventions of speculative fiction to probe the relationship between the language of choice and the experience of trauma, Ness frames his representation of Holocaust-like trauma through his depiction of the collective memory and governance of the Land (the planet's indigenous inhabitants). As a result, Chaos Walking differs from many realist historical novels for young people that focus their narrative energy upon trauma as an individual psychological disorder. The trilogy's growing interest in its final two volumes upon the place of traumatic memory in the mind of the sole indigenous survivor of what is repeatedly referred to as genocide enables Ness to ask contentious questions about the healing of trauma, and how individual trauma differs from cultural trauma.

‘You Can’t Hide from the Things that You’ve Done Anymore’: Battlestar Galactica and the Clash of Civilizations Debate

This article examines the science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica<em> </em>(2003–9) as a complex allegorical exploration of the ways in which Islam is understood and misunderstood in the West. While it never refers directly to Islam, by trading on the metaphoric distance offered by the genre conventions of science fiction, the series radically questions the binary logic of the influential ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which presents ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ as distinct entities at war with one another. With its constantly shifting perspective on two fictional warring civilizations, Battlestar Galactica<em> </em>undermines such simplistic understandings of contemporary religious and political violence. More radically, the series seriously attempts to answer the question posed by a key character representing the West: ‘Why are we as a people worth saving?’

Slavery Through the White-Tinted Lens of an Embedded Black Narrator: Séjour’s “The Mulatto” and Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss” as Intertexts

One of familiar conventions of nineteenth-century southern plantation short fiction is frame narrative, featuring retrospective accounts by slaves or former slaves. origin of this form, Victor Sejour's The Mulatto, is first short story by a U.S.-born African American. (1) Set in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), The Mulatto inaugurated pattern of using an embedded slave or former slave narrator who recounts a harrowing tale of oppression, inhumanity, and psychological suffering under bondage. story was written in French and published in March 1837 issue of Parisian antislavery journal La Revue des Colonies, a monthly periodical owned and sponsored by a society of men of (O'Neill 14). (2) A free man of color, a colonial mulatto, and a native of New Orleans, Sejour migrated to Paris to continue his education and to embark on a career of successful authorship, principally a playwright, in an environment far less repressive than in antebellum South (O'Neill 1). Frances Smith Foster, in noting Sejour's achievement a playwright in France, sees this as proof of international acclaim for a writer of African descent (632). As first work to treat pattern of atrocities of slavery in plantation Americas, The Mulatto serves an intertext for subsequent works that employ an embedded African American slave or former slave a raconteur. One such text is Charles W. Chesnutt's dialect story Dave's Neckliss, originally published in Atlantic Monthly in October 1889 and acclaimed by Richard Brodhead one of [Chesnutt's] most powerful works from any phase of his career, in that it shows Chesnutt projecting both a more dignified, more capable black figure than elsewhere in Uncle Julius tales (17-18). While it seems doubtful that Chesnutt had ever read or even heard of Sejour's story, since it was not translated into English until 1995 for inclusion in Norton Anthology of African American Literature, still The Mulatto and Dave's Neckliss share key intersections. Both may be viewed within a postcolonial context in that they feature colonizers who exploit and victimize African slaves whom they regard inferior and subordinate; both exhibit freedom of African American voice; both share parallels in subject matter--psychological trauma, oppression and dehumanization of slaves, and suicides of principal African American slave characters. Most significantly, both reflect limitations experienced by black writers working within restrictive space of Euro-American literary conventions of melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt) for purpose of appealing to a largely white reading audience. To execute this, Sejour and Chesnutt employ racial tinting of embedded narrators and of protagonists of stories they recount. Both black writers assume guises of white auditors of embedded stories of their narrators, Antoine and Julius, a slave and a former slave. Adopting this stance and approach partly negates and compromises effect of what black narrators say well how they choose to present their narratives; in other words, it restricts range and credibility of their principal narrative voices through melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt), respectively. Moreover, The Mulatto and Dave's Neckliss connect in yet another way. According to Jon Smith, the literature, cultures, and identity politics of U.S. South are seen important ... because they share several traits with those of global South--a history ... of colonial plantations, race slavery ... [and] vibrant African cultural survival (125). In noting some of general similarities among geographical areas known Plantation George B. Handley generally observes, the historical patterns that characterize U.S. South also connect to a larger region of Americas ... creat[ing] a region of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean nations, Caribbean coasts of Central and South America, Brazil, and U. …

Diaspora

Diaspora

The Economics of Plot in Burney's Camilla

Money goes but a little way to make people happy; and true love's not a thing to be got every day --Frances Burney, Camilla By 1796, novelistic rejections of monetary interest, such as this one from Camilla, in favor of sentimental values were cliche. Riches never made men happy (Richardson 534), claims Sir Charles Grandison, and novel after novel perfunctorily repeats some version of that commonsense phrase. By end of eighteenth century proclaiming a lack of interest in money had become, paradoxically, a precondition of having money in fiction since only wealthy characters demonstrate their virtue through their of financial ambition. Underlying paradox of this disavowal is long history of debate between commerce and virtue (see Pocock, esp. 122). On one hand, disavowal presumes that commerce and virtue inhabit separate and opposed realms: love of money and that of virtue are incommensurable. In this way, status of disavowal as fictional convention in late eighteenth century confirms Mary Poovey's argument that by 1790s discursive separation of economic and moral theory was solidified. The so-called Adam Smith problem--the perceived contradictions between Smith's The Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments--succinctly captures this emerging discursive divide (see Tribe and Montes). Meanwhile, disavowal weaves together, through necessary negation, commercial and moral exchanges and suggests their ongoing mutual constitution. Smith, for very different reasons, optimistically argued that two exchanges shared a common path, writing in Moral Sentiments that sympathy and self-interest were not opposed: the road to virtue and that to fortune ... are, happily in most cases, very nearly (74). In Camilla, Frances Burney similarly charts overlapping roads in order to show that while Smith's claim may hold for men, opposite is case for women. The novel plots course of a young woman setting out on road to virtue only to discover that it requires her to disperse, not accumulate, her fortune. Camilla insists on link between commerce and virtue by writing it into fictional cliche that virtuous characters do not strive for wealth in order to show residual, now mystified, inter-dependence of economic and moral discourses. Camilla's journey toward virtue and fortune, and minefields of gender she encounters along way, critique logic behind disavowal by rendering visible how of love of money is, itself, a financial transaction. The explicit rejection of financial ambition for male characters in sentimental novels (for example, Sir Charles Grandison) functions as a form of moral capital in much same way that Pierre Bourdieu describes symbolic capital as working. While mystified as standing outside commercial world, virtue like prestige or taste ultimately translates into financial capital through its ability to reproduce wealth (see also Thompson How The Wanderer Works). Burney's novel, I argue, demonstrates an acute awareness of mystification of virtue's economic roots in order to foreground how financial gains of moral capital are denied to women. To declare that commerce has nothing to do with virtue, or virtue with commerce, problematically masks way moral codes, especially for women, are worked out economically. As Camilla horrifically demonstrates, when women are denied positive economic desires they become entangled in socially coercive relationships, of which marriage is only one example. Camilla's rejection of financial ambition may prove her virtue, but it also leads to debt and despair, and, I argue, it motivates novel's central plot. Women in eighteenth-century fiction frequently find themselves in Camilla's position where they are required to reject money in order to gain moral value. In what Laura Rosenthal has intricately detailed as Clarissa's suicidal virtue of refusal (153) Richardson's heroine refuses all money that could be construed as compensation for her rape and thus starves to death in order to maintain her moral purity. …

Fabrication, déchiffrement, et chiasme: l'Autobiographie dans W ou le souvenir d'enfance et 53 jours de Georges Perec

Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) incorporates an autobiographical narrative that examines and (re)constructs the past after a significant loss. In addition to displaying a need to come to terms with the death of his parents through writing, Perec demonstrates the intention to play with and overcome the limits of autobiography by foregrounding the fragmented nature of memory. In 53 jours (1986), Perec deals as well with the conventions of fiction by inserting autobiographical elements, many only implicitly. 53 jours contains many similarities with W, including the use of word and number games, numerous complex narrative threads, and the continued questioning of the relationships among memory, personal narrative, and national history. A number of studies have examined the experimental nature of Perec's work. This study continues in that vein, revealing the extent to which mirroring, games, and stylistic devices play a fundamental role in creating autobiographical works whose goal is to remain elusive, reducing the possibility of appropriation. I investigate Perec's writing project as a form of creative catharsis that is critical of generic boundaries as well as of the French state.

&lt;i&gt;Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760. Deadly Plots&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760. Deadly Plots Jane Kromm Kirsten T. Saxton . Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760. Deadly Plots. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 151. $89.95. From the time of Sarah Malcolm's arrest through her execution and its aftermath, tales of the laundress's exploits abounded. [End Page 65] These included outrageous and titillating acts, even seductions and engagements. Malcolm's buccaneering impulses seemed to be unstoppable, and were not thwarted by prison cell or tempered by feminine remorse. The subjects of Ms. Saxton's able study are the many eighteenth-century narratives that were spun around the figure of the female murderer. Minimizing genre boundaries, the study considers all relevant types of sources as mutually influential. These include nonfiction criminal writings, "amatory" novels by Behn (The Fair Jilt and The History of the Nun) and Manley (The Wife's Resentment), and two canonical novels, Defoe's Roxana, the Unfortunate Mistress, and Fielding's Amelia. The Epilogue briefly considers the female perpetrators in novels by women from the 1790s: Inchbald's Nature and Art, Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter. Ms. Saxton's theoretical orientation combines a feminist approach to the early novel along with its relationship to legal texts, and argues for the presence of mixed novelistic strategies, especially circumstantiality and realist elements, alongside amatory extremes in all the works studied. Conduct books and legal treatises promoted a standard model for woman's nature against which the female murderer figure was either an unwomanly monster or a travesty of excessive womanliness. Such books of course created exemplars in order to support larger arguments about maintaining social order, a standard that the increasingly popular writings about criminals threatened to erode. Crime writing proliferated from the 1670s through the early 1700s, but particularly in trial reports and the Newgate ordinaries' accounting of a criminal's last days—veritable "misconduct" books as Ms. Saxton aptly calls them. While ubiquitous tales of crime increased anxieties about social instability and upheaval, there was no correlative increase in actual crime. It was precisely the unsavoriness of writing that linked criminal accounts to the work of early novelists and women writers. To understand how early narratives configured female murderers, Ms. Saxton turns to Behn and Manley, whose novels accentuate the circumstances and details of women's crimes, particularly the civic restrictions and legal gaps that withheld protections and due process from women. Such factors are the principal causes of crimes committed by women rather than the "prescriptive fantasies" of the conduct books. In this way, their novels bring a refreshing circumstantiality and a kind of situational ethics to the perception of crime and criminal responsibility. There is also a startling absurdity in the exploits of Behn's and Manley's protagonists, as they mimic rakish behavior (Behn's Miranda) or commit outrageous acts (Manley's Violenta). Four actual cases are examined: Catherine Hayes decapitated her husband in 1726; Mary Blandy poisoned her father in 1752; the servant Sarah Malcolm killed three women in 1733, one a former employer; and Elizabeth Brownrigg tortured and killed a female apprentice in 1767. All four were hanged, and all four committed their crimes with male confederates who in each case were let off lightly (a suspicious feature). Contemporary accounts are consulted for each crime, but with so much material extant, it is impossible to include everything. For example, Blandy's own text of her situation is consulted (it gets a separate chapter along with Fielding's juridical exposition), but Malcolm's is not. Moreover, criminal biographies used "fictional conventions," making them potentially unreliable, and even contemporaries had misgivings about their veracity. Visual [End Page 66] representations of the four criminals are reproduced, and these range from vignettes to the new popular format, criminal portraiture. The images of Blandy are from James Granger, and they are three of the five known contemporary portrayals of her. The Malcolm print is from John Trusler (1800), and is not as subtle as Hogarth's original, which inspired eleven contemporary variants, some with striking circumstantial details. Both sets of "evidence," images and accounts, are canvassed, and...

Dialogues with Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters in German Crime Stories at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Pieke Biermann’s feminist crime collection Mit Zorn, Charme, und Methode (1992) and Lisa Kuppler’s gay and lesbian anthology Queer Crime (2002) engage in a common project, the rewriting of a popular genre to give voice to previously marginalized identities and perspectives. This article investigates the ways in which each volume negotiates the gendered conventions of crime fiction and its subcategories, feminist and queer crime. A comparative analysis of three mysteries from each collection demonstrates the converging and diverging tendencies of feminist and queer representation in turn-of-the-twenty-first century crime narratives. Feminist mysteries by Edith Kneifl, Birgit Rabisch, and Barbara Neuhaus shift generic conventions by aligning narrative perspectives with a feminist world view that destabilizes male-dominated structures through the intervention of a strong female figure who successfully closes the case. By contrast, queer mysteries by Thea Dorn, Ursula Steck, and Susanne Billig destabilize generic conventions and structures of identity altogether, highlighting misreadings and unsolved mysteries through parody, double entendre, and open endings.

Letting go of the truth: researching and writing the other side of silence in women’s lives

In my paper ‘Mixing Memory with the Desire to Forget’ given at the Australian Association of Writing Program’s annual conference last November, I outlined the difficulties in writing about the lives of women, and explained the different narrative strategies I utilised to write about a woman’s history in fiction. Yet, despite writing a novel that strives to highlight the gaps and silences in women’s histories, there remains lingering questions of why the details of‘ordinary’ women’s lives are so difficult to find. This paper examines the reasons why archival information about women’s lives is difficult to unearth, and details some of the ways in which genres such as the social sciences, memoir and fiction have endeavoured to find and document women’s histories. It examines both the loss of women’s history and the ways in which this loss has been, and is being, addressed by writers. It is my contention that it is not only a lack of salient documentation that prohibits certain stories about women from being narrated in fiction, but also that the conventions of realist fiction -particularly the emphasis on revelation and closure - inhibit the narration of certain lives. By challenging the conventions of realism, we, as writers can not only acknowledge the silences that persist in the lives of women in the past, but also signal new ways to write around them.

The Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

This essay argues that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction. Utilizing the form of the psychological case study to articulate how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction, Greene illustrates how late modernism reaffirms the value of a critically maligned popular genre while grappling with the aesthetic paradigms of early modernism.

The Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

This essay argues that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction. Utilizing the form of the psychological case study to articulate how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction, Greene illustrates how late modernism reaffirms the value of a critically maligned popular genre while grappling with the aesthetic paradigms of early modernism.

The Mind and Nature of Locked Rooms: Tarjei Vesaas's Novel The Ice Palace and Metaphysical Crime Fiction

The Mind and Nature of Locked Rooms:Tarjei Vesaas's Novel The Ice Palace and Metaphysical Crime Fiction Anna Westerståhl Stenport Norwegian novelist Tarjei Vesaas's The Ice Palace (Is-Slottet 1963; English translation 1966) is a foundational text in modern Norwegian literature. As a novelist, Vesaas (1897-1970) has been characterized as one of the "foremost innovators in Norwegian literary modernism," sometimes compared to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett (Wærp 321-22). The Ice Palace is one of Vesaas's better-known novels outside of Norway, as it won the prestigious Nordic Council literary prize in 1964, was quickly translated into English and remains in print. Doris Lessing, for example, endorsed the novel in 1993 as a remarkable and unique piece of literature, calling it "subtle," and "strong" (qtd. in Granaas, "The Body" 315), while Arnold Weinstein has recently affirmed its qualities as a masterpiece. These accolades reflect Vesaas's canonical legacy as one of very few authors "writing in Nyorsk to achieve international notoriety" (Wærp 333) and gives credibility to rumors asserting that the author at one time was being considered for the Nobel Prize in literature.1 Telling the story of a thwarted and complicated friendship between two adolescent girls, The Ice Palace is a short and dense novel full of mysterious suggestions and allusions. It is in some ways a classical piece of high-modernist narrative, characterized by psychological complexity, sophisticated schemes of shifting narrative focalization, and lyrical and poetic nature passages. The novel has most often been interpreted along these lines (e.g., Chapman 146-53; Steen 127-29), while more recent thematic interpretations center on questions of budding sexual attraction, tensions between community and individual, constructions of novelistic subjectivity and embodied practices (Granaas), and art and aesthetic representation (Kittang). [End Page 305] I seek in this article to shift the contextual field in which The Ice Palace has been ensconced for decades and show that part of this novel's significance—and its continuing appeal to audiences around the world—lies in its sophisticated manipulation of the postmodern crime genre and its reconstruction of detective fiction as a significant subset of literary modernism. By proposing such a context for what is customarily understood as one of the most canonical novels of Norwegian modernism, I wish to situate Vesaas as part of a larger collective of international writers who elaborate on established conventions of popular fiction to craft novels of stunning complexity. This means addressing The Ice Palace's allusions and veiled references to possible pre-narrative crimes, including ambiguous and ambivalent suggestions of sexual transgressions. Reading the novel in this light repositions this work in several critical ways. It situates it as part of postmodernist world literature as an early and significant counterpart to the successful international exports of Scandinavian crime fiction during the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century as a reworking of fairy-tale tropes that link landscape depiction with trauma suppression and as an implicit comment on the social reconstruction of Norway's collective response to the German invasion of their country during the Second World War. To resituate The Ice Palace in a different literary and historical context, I draw on the term "metaphysical detective fiction," which, as Merivale and Sweeney make clear, is an established term for what other scholars also call "postmodern" (Dettmar) or "anti-detective" (Tani) crime fiction. The term metaphysical detective fiction is particularly useful for analyzing The Ice Palace as it incorporates self-reflexive experimental narrative techniques that signal ambiguity and ambivalence. The metaphysical detective story shares "a kinship to modernist and postmodernist fiction," Sweeny and Merivale argue, while characterized by "the profound questions it raises about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge" (1). As in earlier metaphysical detective fiction by authors such as Borges (e.g., "Death and the Compass" [1942]) or Nabokov (e.g., The Eye [1930]), it is unclear whether an explicit crime has been committed in The Ice Palace. Reading this novel as part of a postmodern interest in the crime genre's complexity allows us to rethink Vesaas's established status as a remarkable but isolated genius of...

The Aliens Won: SF around the World and Back Again

ESSAY The Aliens Won: SF around the World and Back Again Lovie Tidhar Inthis piece,LavieTidhar?editor inchief of theinfluential WorldSFNews Blog?suggests that we liveinthe GoldenAgeofworldSF.He also addresses theimport of theInternet on SF.Check this month's WLTwebsite tofind more SF on the Web. Thealiensare notwhatyoumight think. The English-language term "World SF" has had more than one meaning over the decades. Its earliest incarnation might well be the first Worldcon, or the World Science Fiction Convention, which took place in New York City in 1939, and was named less out of a desire for true international inclusion than to capitalize on thatyear's World's Fair in the city. Though administered by a "World SF Society" and theoretically open to all, itremains to a large extent an American phenomenon. Much later on, another world SF group formed: comprising several prominent US and UK writers, alongside some counterparts from across the world, its main raison d'?tre seems now?perhaps uncharitably?to have been an excuse for Western writers to drink in "exot ic" locales. Little of substance seemed to have emerged from the group for thebenefit of inter national writers, and it is no longer active. The problem with all previous approaches toworld SF from the English-speaking world? including the handful of specialist anthologies thathave appeared over the decades?has been the fact that,by default, such approaches aswere made were done by (certainly well-meaning) Western authors or editors rather than interna tional writers themselves. All this isnow changing. The Internet has been a radical force for change around the world. In terms of interna tional science fiction, ithas opened theway to a cross-pollination that is trulyglobal, democratiz ing a conversation by opening itup, for the first time, to international writers themselves to initi ate and expand. Forme, that change came into effectin 2005. That year, a group of German science-fiction fans decided to embark on a truly collabora tive, international project: Internova, a magazine devoted to international science-fiction and fan tasy stories, tobe selected, translated, edited, and published by people fromoutside of theAmeri can/Britishworld of SF. The first?and only?issue came out, con taining stories by such writers as Guy Hasson from Israel,Wu Yan fromChina, Vandana Singh from India, and others. Inhindsight, the involve ment of too many people at too many stages made the entire process overly cumbersome; distribution problems plagued it from the start; enthusiasms waned, and a second issue never appeared. And yet. . . It is my contention thatInternovarepresented awatershed mark for world SF. For the firsttime, a group of international writers themselves acted to promote theirown work. Using the Internet, German, Italian, Chinese, and Israeli writers cor responded, collaborated, and togethermade a difference. Having been involved with Internova from an early stage, "recruiting" several friends to become involved (Wu Yan, Guy Hasson, South African Richard Kunzmann, and others), I took enormous inspiration from thework done by the Internova collective. And in the meantime . . . May-June 2010 1 39 SCIENCE FICTION LavieTidhar grew up in Israel and South Africa and has since lived inthe United Kingdom, Vanuatu, and Laos. He isthe author of the novels The Bookman and the forthcoming Camera Obscura, both published by HarperCollins. He isalso the author of the novellas An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, and Goreland thePot-Bellied God, and two novels with Nir Yaniv, the English-language The Tel Aviv Dossier and the Hebrew Retzach Bidyoni. Other forthcoming novels include Martian Sands and Osama. He isalso a prolific short storywriter and edited the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer forAdults and The Apex Book ofWorld SF. He runs theWorld SF News Blog at worldsf.wordpress.com. I became aware of other writers like me. Writ ers who worked inmore than one language, or who chose towrite in English in order to reach a wider readership, writers who were passionate about global science fictionand wanted to spread the word. Things were changing. Slowly, international writers began to make an appearance in maga zines?primarily the new wave of Internet pub lications. More novels began to be translated into English, not just in the small press, but by mainstream publishers. And new authors, such...

Narrating the detective: nansensu, silent film benshi performances and Tokugawa Musei's absurdist detective fiction

To better convey the effects of rapid modernization, interwar Japanese authors adopted techniques that went beyond conventional literary realism. Nonsense was integral to this exploration. Uchida Hyakken of the elite bundan circle reacted to the inexplicable aspects of everyday life in his absurdist works, while Yokomitsu Riichi created new narrative structures. Popular authors also investigated the quotidian unknown through formal experimentation. In particular, some writers subverted aspects of the flourishing detective and science fiction genres. This paper discusses how Tokugawa Musei, arguably the most famous benshi or silent film narrator/commentator, undermined conventions of detective fiction by adding aspects of benshi narration to the typical formulae of detective novels. By doing so, Musei supplemented the main narrative with a perspective external to the diegetic narrative. This supplementation resulted in a nonsensical story that overwhelmed the reader with too much contradictory information and overturned the premises of logic integral to detective fiction. To illustrate Musei's techniques, I analyze his 1927 ‘The case of obetai buruburu’, published in the magazine Shinseinen (New youth). Musei's absurdity and humor reveal the potentially deadening effects of literary formulae and show how rationalist epistemological assumptions of realist narrative fiction were too limited to depict the contradictions of urban life.